Other Music Blogs

Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker and author of several widely-read books on music including The Rest Is Noise put up a big list of music blogs, so I thought I would have a look at them. It's a long list, so I'll just pick out a few here and there.

• Being a guitarist, the first one I had a look at was Paul Viapiano. This is the only blog that Alex lists as being about the guitar. The last post was put up on April 4, 2011, fifteen months ago. The last three posts were a defence of unions, a meandering one about writing and one about photography. Nothing about music, let alone about the guitar.
• Under musicology, Alex links to The Taruskin Challenge, an on-going discussion between two grad students as they read through Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music that I have mentioned many times. I sampled a few posts and it seems a very intelligent project. They seem to have come to the end of their posting in February 2012.
• The first blog listed in the musicology section is Dial "M" for Musicology. However good this might have been, the last post was June 25, 2010.
• Music Perceptions is quite up to date with the most recent post on July 6, 2012. That post is a brief critical comment on the discussion of Cage's music in Kay Larson's book, Where The Heart Beats. Several preceding posts are a discussion of the same book. A sampling of other recent posts shows a focus on new music.
• Musically Miscellaneous Mayhem has some posts on the most recent meeting of the American Musicological Society. Posts come few and far between, though.
• Songs You Taught Me is a pop-oriented blog by Sasha Frere Jones that has mostly photos and songs with occasional brief comments. Posting seems fairly frequent.
• Pianist Jonathan Bliss' blog has one or two posts a month, but they are extended, very thoughtful, ruminations on some very interesting questions. The last one is about the Beethoven late quartets and piano sonatas and the source of the differences between them. Very interesting and informed!

This was a fairly random and very sketchy look at a few of the many, many blogs he listed. Alex needs to update his list though, for two very compelling reasons. Some of these blogs are barely active and he missed The Music Salon!

Read more »

A Music Salon Retrospective, Part 2

On the occasion of the first anniversary of this blog, I've been going back and looking over those first posts from a year ago. The first month, as I mentioned yesterday, had 47 posts! But last July I put up 73 posts. Since there were few readers back then, let's have a look at some of them. One of the most interesting was this one about music and narration in which I talk about the uncanny effects when you combine music with narration.

One of the themes of this blog is the necessity for good music criticism and I started that off with this post.

Here is a post about the function of rules in music.

Here's a fun post: my patented catty micro-reviews in which I bring up random clips from YouTube and do one-sentence reviews. Here is an example of one: "Phil Glass is trying to cross the street, but gets hit by a semi-trailer loaded to the roof with Pachelbel CDs." Now you just have to go see what music that could possibly be the review of, right?


Here is a post that talks about how music history tends to alternate between two basic ideas: "make it more complex" and "make it simpler".


Last July really had a lot of good posts and since they aren't topical, you can go read them anytime...


One post was devoted to the great Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov:

That was recorded live from a concert in Switzerland given last July, around when I was writing the post.

Read more »

Future of Classical Music

I was just over at Greg Sandow's blog where he has been talking up a storm about the future of classical music. Why not go over and have a look? I've left a few comments because I think he and I have some interesting philosophical differences. In fact, I spent so much time over there this morning, catching up, that I don't have a new post for my own blog yet!

In case it is not up yet, here is the comment I just left on Greg's last post, "Classical music diversity -- Or the lack of it."

I just want to make two very brief comments. First, I think there is a blind spot in your analysis. Both you and I have worked on the West Coast, you as a pop music critic and myself teaching in a conservatory. Where I was, a huge percentage of the music students were Asian-mostly Chinese. At least half of the piano students and a large percentage of the violin students were Asian. This was in Victoria, British Columbia. No black students, but then there were almost no black residents at that time. Well, there were a couple: the conductor of the symphony was black! So I just don’t really get the racial angle. You write “I’m not saying that people in classical music are consciously racist.” But unconsciously? The other thing is that a young and talented black musician would likely make far more money if he or she DIDN’T go into classical music, right?

I think where we philosophically differ, Greg, is in our sense of what classical music is. My working definition is that classical music can be seen in two ways. One is the music of the Classical period, 1750 – 1827, but the more important sense of the word is that music that has survived the test of time. If you go to a classical music concert you might find music from the Renaissance to the present. Or you might hear a program devoted to a particular era. What you would, or should, expect is that the artists have chosen music of high quality, music that stands out for its aesthetic and expressive power. I have given concerts for voice and guitar where we started with music by Guillaume DuFay, continued with John Dowland, performed some songs by contemporary Cuban composer Leo Brouwer and ended with Blackbird by Paul McCartney. And I consider all of that ‘classical’. But the process of finding the music of the best quality means weeding out the music of lesser quality. It is in that area that I think we may have some differences, but I’m not sure what they would be. I do know that from my point of view the idea that classical music is “drastically out of touch with its time” is to mis-categorize classical music. Music that has achieved ‘classical’ status is supposed to be out of touch with its time!

Read more »